Sharif Digital Repository

Although Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) are capable of significantly improving the information security by detecting the eavesdropper's location, their limited energy motivates our research to propose a secure and energy efficient scheme. Thanks to the common-message philosophy introduced by Rate-Splitting (RS), we no longer have to allocate a portion of the transmit power to radiate Artificial Noise (AN), and yet both the Energy Efficiency (EE) and secrecy can be improved. Hence we define and study the Secrecy Energy Efficiency (SEE) of a multi-carrier multi-UAV network, in which Cooperative Rate-Splitting (CRS) is employed by each multi-antenna UAV Base-Station (UAV-BS) for protecting... 

Satisfying the clients' uncompromising priorities is a challenge for decision makers of organizations that face multiple projects. This paper considers an organization with a multi-skilled workforce working on several predetermined projects under time-of-use energy tariffs where distributed load energy usage is the primary concern of energy suppliers. This paper also considers different time-of-use energy tariffs, which are among the most common strategies to reach a more balanced energy utilization. The problem is stated as a bi-objective mixed-integer programming model containing two conflicting objectives; to minimize the total cost of the multi-skilled workforce and obtain a sustainable... 

The power-to-liquid concept is a promising strategy to convert the power plants' flue gas to value-added liquid fuels using renewable energy. This technology could potentially reduce global greenhouse gases emissions and mitigate the environmental problems associated with the fossil fuels industry. In this regard, the main objective of the present study is to propose a novel power-to-liquid plant for the synthesis of formic acid and ammonia from power plants' flue gas, emphasizing the role of electrochemical technologies and renewable energy. The system's basis is developed by the integration of CO2 electroreduction cell, alkaline water electrolysis cell, and photovoltaic panel technologies.... 

Renewable hydrogen production plays a key role in transitioning to a hydrogen economy. For this, developing countries are encouraged to keep up with industrialized nations. As such, this study seeks to evaluate the potential of all capital cities of Iran in terms of solar-based hydrogen production and prioritize the nominated alternatives. This step is highly valued because finding the most suitable place for this purpose can lead to substantial outcomes and consequently avoid failure. Therefore, here a 20-kW solar power plant is simulated by PVsyst 6.7 software and meteorological data of 31 capital cities is extracted using Meteonorm 7.1 software. Considering all losses associated with... 

Reducing the renewable energy costs is necessary for the competition with the fossil energies and control strategies have great impact on the efficiency of wind machines. In the wind turbine industry, a practical approach is to maximize the energy capture of a wind machine by optimizing the power coefficient in the under-rated situations. In this paper, with the main objective of maximizing the energy capture in the second region, four different control strategies are compared in the presence of uncertainties. The proposed control methods are compared based on their power capture and robustness against probable uncertainties in the structural and environmental parameters. A two-mass... 

Nowadays, around 70% percent of global energy usage is consumed in urban areas. Undoubtedly, this figure will increase in coming decades due to population rise. As a result, energy resiliency can be considered as an important issue in urban context. Resilience of energy supply in urban areas can be categorized in two approaches, short-term and long-term. Short-term applies to cope with threats such as earthquakes and floods, and long-term applies to deal with impacts of climate change on global warming. In this study, literature review was applied to design questionnaire for expert survey, followed by Fuzzy analytic hierarchy process method to categorize 34 sub-criteria divided under four... 

Diffusive molecular communications (DiMC) have recently gained attention as a candidate for nano- to micro- and macro-scale communications due to its simplicity and energy efficiency. As signal propagation is solely enabled by Brownian motion mechanics, DiMC faces severe inter-symbol interference (ISI), which limits reliable and high data-rate communications. Herein, recent literature on DiMC performance enhancement strategies is surveyed; key research directions are identified. Signaling design and associated design constraints are presented. Studies on fundamental information theoretic limits of DiMC channel are reviewed. Classical and novel transceiver designs are discussed with an... 

Efficient utilization of solar energy as the cleanest and most plentiful natural resource for drinking water is a water is as sustianble and environmental friendly approach to obviate long-standing water scarcity. Carbon-based photothermal absorbers due to broadband light absorption are very interesting in interfacial solar steam generation systems. Herein, we investigate the convenient application of reduced graphene oxide (rGO) nanosheets with carbon black (CB) nanoparticles on the cotton fabric as a flexible texture-based photothermal absorber. Polyurethane (PU) as a self-floating insulator foam was selected to manage the energy loss and preserve light converted to heat on the fabric... 

The purpose of this research is to provide power grid energy efficiency solutions. In this paper, a comprehensive review and its optimal solution is proposed considering the various challenges of smart grid demand-side management. The main technique is based on a novel idea in the Smart Grid—demand response optimization which enables autonomous energy management on the demand side for a wide variety of customers. The first section of this research examines the smart grid issue and evaluates the state-of-the-art load management techniques in terms of the work’s scope. The demand-side load management architecture consists of three primary levels, two of them in line planning and low-cost... 

Given the various advantages of electric vehicles compared to conventional gasoline vehicles in terms of energy efficiency and environmental pollution (among others), this paper studies the factors affecting customers’ willingness to purchase electric vehicles. An integrated discrete choice and agent-based approach is applied to model the customers’ choice for the valuation of electric vehicles based on the internal reference price. The agent-based model evaluates customers’ preferences for a number of personal and vehicle attributes, according to which vehicle they chose. Data from 376 respondents are collected to estimate a random-parameter logit model where customers are asked to reveal... 

Because of the low outflow temperature of the conventional photovoltaic thermal systems and lack of electrical production of the solar thermal collectors, a novel combined system is proposed to solve the two mentioned drawbacks. This novel system is achieved by connecting a photovoltaic thermal unit to a solar thermal collector in series. To increase the overall performance of this novel combined system, different hybrid nanofluids include (1) multiwall carbon nanotube-aluminum oxide (2) multiwall carbon nanotube-silicon carbide (3) graphene-aluminum oxide, and (4) graphene-silicon carbide are compared. The investigation is performed based on the three-dimensional simulation, and the... 

In recent years, the mining of cryptocurrencies such as Bitcoin has attracted much global attention due to the simplicity and high profitability of this business, especially in countries with low electricity rates. The process of cryptocurrency mining using cryptocurrency mining devices requires a significant amount of computing power. This industry, which is increasingly growing in energy and carbon emissions, can cause environmental concerns. Common ways to reduce this amount of energy consumption are to prohibit mining and charge these loads at a higher electricity rate; however, these solution methods are not feasible and applicable in many countries. This paper presents an energy... 

In addition to meeting the real-time constraint, power/energy efficiency and high reliability are two vital objectives for real-time embedded systems. Recently, heterogeneous multicore systems have been considered an appropriate solution for achieving joint power/energy efficiency and high reliability. However, power/energy and reliability are two conflict requirements due to the inherent redundancy of fault-tolerance techniques. Also, because of the heterogeneity of the system, the execution of the tasks, especially real-time tasks, in the heterogeneous system is more complicated than the homogeneous system. The proposed method in this paper employs a passive primary/backup technique to... 

Excitation Controlled Synchronous Generator-based Wind Turbine (ECSG WT) is a recently proposed Wind Turbine (WT) scheme that has not been fully investigated in detail. This paper intends to analyze the performance of the ECSG WT scheme and compare it with those of two mainstream WT schemes based on electrically excited synchronous generator, i.e., VSC-based full converter WT and diode bridge rectifier-based WT equipped with boost converter on its Direct Current (DC) link. The objective of this comparison is to demonstrate great potentials of ECSG WT to be considered in the wind industry. To do so, two successful Wind Turbine (WT) schemes in the market that are structurally close to ECSG WT... 

Energy harvesting systems powered by renewable energy sources employ hybrid volatile-nonvolatile memory to enhance energy efficiency and forward progress. These systems have unreliable power sources and energy buffers with limited capacity, so they complete long-running applications across multiple power outages. However, a power outage might cause data inconsistency, because the data in nonvolatile memories are persistent, while the data in volatile memories are unsteady. State of the art studies proposed various memory architectures and compiler-based techniques to tackle the data inconsistency in these systems. These approaches impose too many unnecessary check-points on the system to... 

Solar heater has been known as an application of the solar thermal energy that is commonly employed for water heating. Purpose of this research is to introduce a conceptual model for employing solar water heaters (SWHs) in Yazd, Iran. Moreover, structural equation modeling (SEM) is used for assessing effect(s) of the available parameters on the suggested model. Political-cultural-social issues, economic issues, financial support, geographic location, infrastructure, and interactions were assessed as the independent variables of the study. AMOS was used to implement the processes and design the research questionnaire. According to SEM, the dependent variable “interaction” via “economic... 

Hyperdimensional (HD) computing is a lightweight machine learning method widely used in Internet of Things applications for classification tasks. Although many hardware accelerators are proposed to improve the performance of HD, they suffer from low flexibility that makes them not practical in most real-life scenarios. To improve the flexibility, an open-source instruction set architecture (ISA) called RISC-V has been employed and extended for a specific application such as machine learning. This article aims to improve the efficiency and flexibility of HD computing for resource-constrained applications. To this end, we extend a RISC-V core (RI5CY) for HD computing called RISC-HD. First, to...